South Dakota slips in transparency grading

Groups says other states doing more for open government

Mar. 27, 2013

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Other states in the country are outpacing South Dakota when it comes to government transparency, a new report has concluded.

In the annual scorecard of state transparency by the advocacy group U.S. PIRG Education Fund, South Dakota got a “C” grade. That’s down from a “B” last year.

This doesn’t mean South Dakota is getting less transparent — just that other states are doing more to open up than South Dakota is.

“Think of this in terms of a kind of marking on a curve,” said Phineas Baxandall, senior analyst for tax and budget policy for U.S. PIRG, the federation of state public interest research groups. “It just means that other states have been improving a lot faster. If you’re not moving forward, you’re slipping behind.”

South Dakota did well in many areas of the scorecard, getting full marks for posting state contracts and expenditures on its transparency website, open.sd.gov.

But South Dakota lost points for not posting information about tax expenditures — how much money isn’t collected because of exemptions and loopholes in the tax code. It also was marked down for not posting information about economic development incentives on Open SD. That information is available on the state’s economic development webpage but isn’t on open.sd.gov.

“For regular citizens who would be looking for information about state spending, they shouldn’t have to imagine that there might be other type of spending that isn’t listed, obtain the names that aren’t listed and hunt down their website,” Baxandall said. “It should be a form of one-stop shopping.”

Tony Venhuizen, a senior adviser to Gov. Dennis Daugaard, was surprised the state got a lower grade than last year.

“Even they’re acknowledging that we got better over the last year, so it’s a little odd that their grade shows we’re getting worse. But I see what they’re trying to do,” he said.

Venhuizen said Daugaard would consider the report’s suggestions and had adopted recommendations from previous reports such as this one.

“We always take a look at where we lost points and see if there are things that make sense to improve on,” he said.

But he defended the current Open SD website, saying it seemed strange to deduct points for information that’s already available on a different website. Venhuizen also said the tax expenditure data U.S. PIRG wants to see could be “challenging to calculate” and probably would be estimates rather than exact figures.

He said Daugaard continually has made South Dakota government more transparent.

“A lot of this information didn’t used to be posted at all,” he said. “I think posting it is a major step.”

Indeed, South Dakota’s “C” grade still is higher than 2011, when it got a “D+.”

“The folks at the state may be disappointed with this year’s grade, but they are doing one heck of a job compared to where things were just a few years ago,” Baxandall said.

“The big story here is that transparency is improving by leaps and bounds, and South Dakota, like almost every other state, should feel really proud of the work they’re doing.”